The Weather Made Me Leave

THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, like many other parts of the country, has been hit by a severe cold spell recently. I've been walking around the last week shivering and freezing, even with my multiple layers of warm clothing on. It's so cold it hurts -- my face freezes, my neck and back muscles tense up, my feet get numb. I go inside to warm up, but jumping back outside seems like too much self-punishment.

So why do I stay here? My settled self rationalizes the weather away: it's not so bad, once you get indoors; hey, you're living in a city, and we're all in it together; it'll change soon. But my nomadic self knows better, knows that it's insane to stay rooted with no reason, knows that all it takes to fix this is a move southwards.

And besides, I've been staying at the hostel, and I've got a week or two before I move into my new (still temporary) digs for the early spring, so I've got some time to kill. And Chloe, Michelle's car, is still up here, sitting forlorn out in the town of Kent. The rays of sunshine on the California license plates forlornly and weakly reach southwards, towards her home. I will take her there.

I SPEND THE morning and early afternoon packing my home and office into storage, hastily debugging clients' problems, and trying not to faint from hunger and exposure along the way.

Finally, responsibilities complete, I drive south out of Seattle, into a beautiful clear afternoon. Southern Washington stretches out in front of me, snow-covered Mt. Rainier rises to the east, and the planes from the Boeing airfield rise in the west. John Coltrane, live from Stockholm, guides my way out of the city.

Of course, the late Wednesday afternoon that it is, I hit rush hour traffic almost immediately, and become one with the commuters all the way south past those Seattle suburbs of Kent, Auburn, and Tacoma. The traffic thins out by the time I reach Olympia, and I relax to watch the sun filter through leafless trees, across the icy ponds skirting the freeway, and reflect so orange against the mountain.

Passing through Olympia reminded me of the week I spent up here, back a few years ago in another Northwest winter. Although my intent was to visit and apply for Evergreen College, the more important lesson learned was how to live homeless (aka traveling on a tiny budget) in a small town -- where to find a hearty breakfast with a scenic view; how to stash my bags for the day at the Greyhound station; where to ride my bike in the surrounding parks; which cafes were good for the late afternoon coffee stop; which theatre showed cheap movies at night; and how to ask for a bed for the night at the men's shelter in the church basement. I may have learned more about living in one intense week than I would have if I'd gone to school there.

Continuing south on the windy freeway, I pull into a rest-stop to pee. There's a couple here from a local church serving free coffee and cookies to cold and sleepy travelers. Will I be doing this one day?

Just after dark, I reach Vancouver, Washington, bastard son of Portland. My friend Karen lives here now, although she was living in Seattle just two days ago. She meets me at the corner market, and we find a place to eat burgers and drink coffee, on the shores of the Columbia River, with a harsh wind blowing even colder air into the pores of my skin. I have been driving south, haven't I?

Confusion arises about exactly where I'm staying for the night, so I decide to play it safe by crashing at the youth hostel in Portland, just a few miles south. Of course, I get utterly and completely lost on my way down there, finding myself alternately in the wilds of the Portland suburbs and in the jungle of concrete freeways.

I'd forgotten that when I drive, I sometimes get so frustrated and stressed out that my temples throb, and I worry that I've broken something in my head. This is not a good thing when I am trying to maintain control of a several-thousand-pound vehicle. But I try to calm myself, relax, consider all the suburbs of Portland that I would never see if I hadn't gotten lost, and perhaps blame this on the weather.

But finally I do reach the hostel, check in, and meet Karen and her friend Joe at Bread and Ink, a local cafe that has just closed its doors for the evening, but lets us stay for a while anyway. After a brief chat, we head back into the bitter cold, Karen and Joe back up to Vancouver, and me back up the street to the hostel. I put myself to sleep laughing while reading Meet the Monks, the tales and adventures of the Jim Crotty and Michael Lane, the mad monks of the road. I decide that they are fine role models: interesting, creative, queer, full of ideas, and crazy nomads.

IT'S STILL COLD. No, it's colder now. I might as well be nude, for the good that my layers are doing me. I leave the hostel and creep out to find breakfast and read the local news. Apparently there are very studly construction workers who are working today, way up atop the new federal courthouse building in downtown Portland. They can take the weather; they are men. Even the women construction workers are men, apparently.

Having fed my body, I attempt feed my mind at the local Internet cafe in Portland, The Habit. It's not come highly recommended by friends, but I find it quite functional, if spartan and unassuming. No need for fancy finishes and workstations here; all I want to do is read my email. So for a few bucks, I caught up with the rest of my world.

One of my reasons for coming to Portland is to check out a bookstore called Reading Frenzy, which sells mostly zines and other small press publications. I want to talk to Chloe, the owner of the store (and no relation to Michelle's car) about my idea of driving a zinemobile around the country this summer, since part of my inspiration was hearing her talking at a conference about how she started her bookstore. Chloe (not the car) isn't there, though, but her co-worker Jackie is quite excited about the idea and helpful with suggestions, including the offer of having a mechanic friend of hers help me find a suitable vehicle. Of course, I can't go into a store like that and come out empty-handed, so I buy $20 worth of weird and wonderful zines to absorb on the way southwards.

I'm happy to finally leave Portland and head southwest, along one of those corridors of strip-malls that goes on seemingly forever, through towns like Tigard, Tualatin, and McMinnville, out towards the Oregon coast and Highway 101, my pathway to the Golden State.

Nestled in one of the many shopping centers, I spot a Radio Shack, and decide to realize a dream I've had for years: to get a portable tape recorder so I can record the thoughts, signs, placenames, and other ephemera that so quickly slides out of my mind. Like all other trips to Radio Shack, I spend most of my time haggling with the Radio Shack guy, who is apparently a standup comedian on the side. I pay my money, refuse to give my name to their gargantuan and eternal mailing list, and leave with my new technology.

I load the tape and batteries, head back into the strip-mall hell, and find myself almost immediately pressing the record button and describing what I see. Uh oh -- this could be addictive. I've known people who carry around recorders and refuse to have anything but the most trivial conversation without recording the damn thing for posterity. And if you succumb to that, you'll soon realize that tape is not enough; you need digital recording, with automatic indexing and hypertext filing, and all this needs to be so small and portable that you don't even have to take out a machine, but somehow everything will be recorded anyway.

The stripmalls gradually fade away, replaced by the detritus of your average American highway, with ancient pickup trucks rusting by the roadway, fields half-plowed and now hard with frost and ice, old barns collapsing amongst the meadows. A pulp mill spews its noxious fumes in the distance. We're in logger country, folks.

The farther west I get, the warmer and greener it becomes! I think I'm finally cheering up.

In the town of Sheridan, one-bedroom apartments are $350 a month. And you have your choice of churches here: the "independent and fundamental" Baptist or the presumably-unworldly Jehovah's Witnesses' Kingdom Hall. But most places in Sheridan are closed, I think for good.

I stop for lunch at the Rocket Cafe in Willamina (that's pronounced "wil-a-my-na"). It must be a small town -- everyone who comes in the cafe knows everyone else. I keep to myself, and quietly read the local zines -- an agricultural trader and a classified paper.

Out at my car, I struggle as usual with the lock. Chloe (Michelle's car, not the bookstore owner) has always had trouble with the key; you have to jiggle it around for a while until it works. But hmm, this time it's really having troubles. I pull out the key, and realize that it's now broken -- with half of the key in the still-locked car. Well, could be worse, I suppose -- it could be colder, or I could be somewhere less convenient than the Rocket Cafe.

So I go back inside and tell my tale to the regulars. They marvel at the broken key, and someone suggests calling the wife of a man in town who's "good with things like that." Minutes later, this same man walks in the cafe, but it's just a coincidance: he hadn't even been home to get the message yet. He orders a coffee (first things first), looks at my key, and goes back to his coffee. I, realizing that this is a very small town, and that while I might be a nice guy, I'm obviously not from around here, sit quietly at the counter, looking at the road, waiting for the man to finish his coffee.

He turns out to be a nice guy, too, and does his part jiggling the key in the lock. But he finally says that, no, he can't do much about it, and agrees I'd be better off calling a locksmith.

But the field locksmith is busy today. So I find a towing company who can get the car back to McMinnville where the locksmith company is. I discover that the tow guy just moved up here from Petaluma, "to get away from all that California bullshit." So we spend most of the drive back comparing notes about what we don't like about California, and maybe just a little about what we do like, but not much.

There's something about riding in a towtruck that makes everything okay. Whatever calamity happened, already did; my car or truck or van is safely (I hope) attached to the towtruck, I'm riding shotgun next to someone who knows where is going (I hope); and all I have to do is look out the window at the landscape passing by. You might sense that I've been through this before, and you'd be right. I have fond memories of being towed across the Mojave desert from Barstow to Needles; of hitching a ride with the local sheriff in the Anasazi country of southern Utah; of meeting and re-meeting the guy who kept towing my camper whenever it broke down in Sebastopol. You might say that I have accepted the towtruck into my life, and my life is better for it.

At the locksmith, I get a crash course in key and lock science, finding out that the real problem with Chloe (the car) is that the key was made incorrectly sometime in the distant past before Michelle owned the car. No wonder it's never fit right -- it was just plain wrong! But the clever locksmith guys found a code written on the inside of the owner's manual that somehow, magically, translates to the exact cut needed for a replacement key. They quickly make three copies (my suggestion), which work so well it makes the car appear new. Almost.

I head westwards again, through McMinnville, Sheridan, Willamina, and finally out to new territory, almost running out of gas but not quite, and finally make it out to the coast just as the sun is setting purple on the water.

In Newport, I make a happy discovery of the Marbles Yogurt & Deli Cafe, a healthy place that serves me a fine dinner of vegetarian lasagne, fruit, and Mexican hot chocolate, all for a scant $6. And down the road a bit, find a cheap motel where I spend a quiet and warm night, dreaming of broken keys of happiness.

I OPEN THE motel blinds to the east, towards the bright blinding sun of morning. At last! Potential warmth! Outside, it's still chilly, but I'm already feeling better. No longer am I in the frigid Pacific Northwest; now I'm on the warm Oregon Coast.

On the way into town last night, I passed a unique espresso bar: an old boat, propped up, and apparently outfitted with power, water, and the sacred bean. But this morning I find the boat closed, perhaps dry-docked for good from its sea of coffee.

Desperate in my quest for road-tunes, I find an unmarked cassette in Michelle's tape box. It turns out to be either a funk band from the '70s, or a clever '90s clone; these days, how can you tell? Real or retro, my mind drifts back to the era of moon boots and mood rings, CB radios, superchromed supervans, and those reflective rainbow stickers on big belt buckles. Voodoo love child, let's you and me boogie the night away.

Fudge shops, hot water taffy, bridges over bays and river inlets, motels, antique shops, seafood restaurants: such is the Oregon Coast, from Cathlamet south to Bandon. Like the farmlands of the midwest where each town sports the standard grain tower, auto parts store, and tiny cafe, the cultural waves of the coast crest in each small town, with the waves returning in the dunes in between.

On my right, the beaches and the ocean are the constant. Unfortunately for me, they're constantly depressing: there's something about the air pressure, or the negative ions, or the vast expanse of ocean beyond, that causes my brain to slow and my thoughts to run heavily to negative. Of course, I don't remember this problem until I'm out there on the beaches, stuck in my pissed-off-ness, wondering where the past and future have gone.

I stop for a moment to rest and wander onto the rocky beach. This is not the type of beaches that most people are drawn to; like the North Atlantic beaches of Maine, here the cliched grains of sand are pebbles, rocks, and driftwood, all rounded smooth by eons of being pushed and pulled along by the inhaling and exhaling ocean waves. There's a chattering, clattering sound as the smaller pebbles are dragged back to sea by the exiting waves.

Even in all the highway's winding grandeur and romance, the sheer rugged cliffs, the monumental rocks sitting out there quiet in the sea, the Pacific Coast is somehow invisible to me. I've seen so many photographs and guidebook descriptions of this stretch of land, I can hardly see the true nature of what it is I'm passing through. Like the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, and other American icons of geography and culture, the scene appears flat and washed-out, like a cheesy Hollywood movie set. How do I get out of this commercial?

Descending towards the town of Florence, all this ruggedness fades into a long view of mild, flat coastline, with sandy beaches, sand dunes, rivers feeding freshwater ponds, lakes, and reedy wetlands among forests. The road heads inland, and I feel calmer.

My mid-morning coffee break finds me at a small green drive-in espresso cart in a parking lot. Calling it a cart is to underestimate it; the Lucky Lady Espresso trailer has a home-built quality, with cedar shakes and siding. While my Americano is brewing, I ask the mobile barrista about his nomadic coffee trailer. He bought the cart up in Seattle and towed it down to Florence, having grown tired of the sudden change of the Emerald City into something more resembling Los Angeles. Now he pumps coffee for the locals and visitors to Florence, occasionally moving the trailer out to the beach for a fair.

I want to explore the side-roads and less-beaten paths off of 101, but I've told my cousin Jack that I'll be arriving in his neck of the woods by this afternoon.

In the town of Coos Bay, I try to find a printing museum that I remember passing this summer, but it's closed for the winter. I realize I need a break from the eternal asphalt anyway, and stop to wander around downtown. Passing in and out of shops, I keep seeing flyers advertising Internet training. Ah ha! Perhaps I can satisfy my email fix here!

Asking around, I'm guided towards an unassuming building housing a small business center. There I meet Bill Russell, who was a programmer in the defense industry "until peace broke out." Now he manages the Internet lab and teaches weekly classes in email, websurfing, and electronic publishing. I tell him how I keep in touch with my friends while on the road through my little laptop, a modem, and my calling card. He invites me up to the lab, a room upstairs with a dozen PC workstations and a dedicated net connection (56k frame-relay, for you net.geeks out there). He boots up a machine for me, and I telnet over to meer.net and see what's waiting for me.

Meanwhile, Bill tells me about the classes he teaches in using the Internet and developing web pages, as well as offering tutoring and open labs.

I'm curious what kind of people come to the lab -- are they individuals who just want to explore the net in their spare time, or are they businesses who want to put themselves online? According to Bill, there is a surge of interest from people in the area who see the Internet as a new place to base their career. The lab is closely associated with the local work retraining agency, as well as the retraining programs at the local college. After all, this is logging country, and the logging industry is sagging in many places like Coos Bay.

The people who live here see the exploding net as a place to make a new start: to move from processing wood to processing information. And unlike the huge upheaval of the last hundred years where so many rural people gave up their farms and moved to the cities and towns where the factories were, there is the real possibility that places like Coos Bay could support the infrastructure needed for these new "knowledge workers" without shattering the social structure.

The barn-raising of the networks is happening quickly: all along the Southern Oregon coast, network packets move far faster than logs between the small towns. In the Coos Bay area, there are already four commercial Internet service providers, as well as an educational network. Small web design firms are rapidly moving regional information online -- on one local server, I saw calendars of local events and festivals, as well as listings of motels all down the coast

Bill's dream is to create a telework center where people who work at home would have a place where they could come to use expensive equipment like high-speed laser printers, copiers, and net connections, as well as having short-term access to conference rooms and office spaces.

Eventually, through the foggy electronic ether, I hear the road calling me back to its pure reality. I say goodbye and goodluck to Bill, with the promise to check in again with him soon to see what new project he's up to.

South of Bandon, I stop at an art gallery in a huge old Woodsman's Hall, built around the turn of the century. The bare wood walls are deep and dark from years of use, and although the owner and her family once lived here, the interior spaces have been hardly changed. This is no fancy conversion; there's still no insulation or sheetrock, and for that I'm glad. The upstairs rooms are sparsely decorated, with a woodstove and a few couches and chairs. It's currently used by the kids as a roller-skating practice rink, I'm told.

I have fantasies about living in these kind of places -- an ideal home for a season or so spent on the quiet coast, writing, thinking, seeing. More likely, I'd find a phone line and a local net connection, and ponder my morning email over coffee and the ocean breeze in from the coast.

At the town of Gold Beach, I turn inland, and the harsh cliffs of the coast mellow into green, gentler hills. I'm driving along the Rogue River on 42 miles of rough, narrow, winding road, past the Prehistoric Gardens where Brontosaurus and Tyrannasaurus Rex crane their necks above the fir trees, past Humbug Mountain. Waterfalls cascade to the asphalt from between mossy rocks and ferns. Moss covers everything here -- the trees, the rocks, even the road itself. If I stopped long enough, Chloe and I might sprout a layer of moss, the skin of blue auto and pink human turning to a glowing sheen of emerald green.

Along the shores of the river, large signs advertise rides in "commercial mailboats." Before the roads were passable, boats delivered the mail and other essentials to the people who lived out here. Now that service isn't necessary, so the mailboats have been converted to passenger service, and all summer long, they rumble up and down the Rogue, ferrying tourists along the river rapids. Summer also finds the river filled up with noisy jet boats. But in this off-season time, the mailboats and jetboats are happily silent.

I stop at a roadside market/post-office/bait-store and buy a soda, only afterward realizing that I spent my last dollar of cash. Oh well; there's nothing else out here that I could buy, anyway.

The canyon widens into a valley in which a sawmill once operated. The fields are grown up around the rusty hulks of ancient machines of unknown uses. Here and there are huge stacks of logs, now dry and white like weathered bones. On a pitted side-road, a weighing station lies neglected in the sun, grass growing out of joints that once shifted under the weight of trucks hauling tons of harvested trees.

Jack meets me at the base of Spud Road, near the crossing of the Rogue and the Illinois Rivers. I grab some clothes, my sleeping bag, and my laptop, and park Chloe out of sight, near the bottom of the steep hill, next to an old school bus and a horse trailer. Jack navigates his trusty 4-wheel-drive pick-up truck slowly over the rocks and ruts of the muddy road. I'm glad I didn't ask Chloe to try to make this; she would have been very much out of her urban element, like wearing slippers to climb a mountain.

Jack's place is a modest cabin on a bit of land, just up and over the ridge so he doesn't hear the roar of the summer jetboats. A little creek burbles off in the woods; a calm meadow is home to dozens of birds and other people of the woods. At first look, the house looks handmade, almost organically grown for this little space. But underneath the wooden siding, the deck, the windows looking out into the dark trees, is a standard-issue mobile home, moved simply onto the land without the customary clearcutting and landmauling required of constructed houses.

As in most tiny lived-in places, the multiroom model of the Victorian age is deconstructed, reduced, and ultimately ignored. There are two rooms here: a smaller one at the back that serves partly as guest bedroom but mostly as storage, and a larger front room, which serves as kitchen, living room, office, bedroom, and wildlife observation station.

Sitting amongst the homey clutter of books, papers, computers, salsa, and chips, we cook a simple dinner and talk of our respective lives, of Leary and Huxley and Blake, of poetry and Macintoshes, of networking and small towns.

Jack finds this poem by Blake:

I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a ball,

It will lead you in at Heaven's gate

Built in Jerusalem's wall.

When I was growing up near Washington, DC, Jack was living there as well, married and raising a son. Jack eventually migrated west to Portland, finally detaching completely from urban life and settling in this isolated river canyon. Now his passion is poetry: everyday, he sits down at his little Macintosh and writes simple, direct poems. Like chipping away at a great rock, he finds verse in the veins, slowly unearthing shapes of beauty from the buried emotions. O long line of mountain poets, you have another in your midst.

Before going to sleep, not being able to resist the urge to make a brief connection with the rest of the known world, I pull out my laptop, connect to Jack's phone line, and get my email. Bad idea.

In an instant, I am shocked back into the world I had escaped, of violent stormy data seas, of the vast managerial hierarchies, of towering milestones and deadlines of projects not yet finished, of the clunky, boxy, and unnavigable cybernetic city of information we are so intent on building. Now accustomed to either the rumbling asphalt path, or the peace of Jack's meadow, my mind reels from the impact of so many bytes, rules, goals.

My life flashes before me, and I feel like a tiny gypsy come upon the great walls of a great unknown city. Is this Jerusalem, or Babylon? Is this really a home? I can ply my craft here, maybe earn a bit of cash to buy shiny new things. But I know that the vortex sucks strong here; strong enough to pull me in and close the door forever.

I toss and turn that night, sleeping little, pondering ways out of this morass. I realize that I am fooling myself when I say I work for myself; it is to others who I sell my time, my energy, my life, under the guise of "freelancing," "contracting," even "self-employed."

I refuse to believe that this is the way of the world. Alternatives flash in my mind: exciting, colorful shapes, but now dim, obscured by rigid fogs. I try to see, but cannot, and as I tire myself to sleep, only the vaguest of ideas seats itself in my mind: to work for myself rather than for other people.

I WAKE UP to Jack reading me a poem he has written this morning:

little john travels
byways and highways

joining man and nature
in passing vision
of life's splendoring light

Let the world note
a nomadic impulse
resounding to the call
of past lives retelling

ways to wander wild
traveling today's sea
of poly mecca swirls

Thinking of my journey ahead of me today, I give thanks to the other poets of the road. Jack takes me back down Spud Road, bumping and jouncing over the muddy ruts, to where Chloe rests. I pack up, and we head back along the Rogue River towards the sea.